Character builds / game longevity

Diablo3 needs a reason to reroll new characters. Character builds in Diablo2 were one of the staple features, besides itemization, that gave it such longevity. I know I wasn't the only player constantly making new characters and, IMO, that was the heart and soul of the game.

The 'skill rune' system is a great opportunity to provide this. If the choices made became permanent you'd have a unique character. The power of choice would get us all rerolling to modify our builds. Players would experiment to see if they liked playing with various skill modifications.

As it stands now, what reason do players have to reroll? I fear that without the concept of a character 'build' then we won't have a lasting game. That it’ll be missing a key feature of Diablo2.

Am I missing something about Diablo3, or is the game really designed to only have us make one character per class?
How do you feel about rerolling, has Blizzard cut an important feature?

I see what you're saying but personally if I had to start from scratch again every time I wanted to try out a new build on a class I'd probably stop playing the game, it would negatively affect it - not add longevity. I know that it added something that some people in D2 liked, but I think games have moved on a lot since then and your "average mainstream gamer", I put that in quotes because it's something hard to define, but I think your average gamer probably doesn't want to grind for 30 hours to get to a certain level and then have to start all over again because it turns out there's a slightly better build.

So for me, I prefer this system to the D2 system, but that's just my personal choice as what I would consider a fairly casual/mainstream gamer.

I liked having 3 assassins and 2 sorcs and so on, but it's not game breaking to only have 5 characters. In fact, if they are going to be strict about their char limit like there were with 8 in D2, I prefer the new way, instead of having the 6 accounts I had in D2 for all my characters and mules.

I still highly doubt it will be convenient to just swap skills out and totally change your build in the middle of running inferno. For one, your items won't likely match your new playstyle, and even if you carried a second set of gear that matched you would eventually start running out of inventory space. If you're someone who really wants two different builds of a character all the time you might end up making a second character regardless.

Leveling was absolutely part of the fun, but that's why there's hardcore mode. And if hardcore mode is too easy, those of us who are truly hardcore at heart will find ways to make the game challenging to the point where we do die and have to start over. Also, I doubt we will level nearly as fast in D3 as D2, and the extremespeed was part of what made D2 leveling enjoyable. If 1-80 was anything like 80-90 or 90-99 then we would have all preffered infinite free respecs from the start =p

Diablo3 needs a reason to reroll new characters. Character builds in Diablo2 were one of the staple features, besides itemization, that gave it such longevity. I know I wasn't the only player constantly making new characters and, IMO, that was the heart and soul of the game.

The 'skill rune' system is a great opportunity to provide this. If the choices made became permanent you'd have a unique character. The power of choice would get us all rerolling to modify our builds. Players would experiment to see if they liked playing with various skill modifications.

As it stands now, what reason do players have to reroll? I fear that without the concept of a character 'build' then we won't have a lasting game. That it’ll be missing a key feature of Diablo2.

Am I missing something about Diablo3, or is the game really designed to only have us make one character per class?
How do you feel about rerolling, has Blizzard cut an important feature?

If I have to reroll every time I want to try a different skill, I'm sure as hell not going to waste time experimenting. I'm going to look up somebody else's popular build and copy that.

In other words, lots of people are going to end up with the exact same build to avoid rerolling, which by odd coincidence is what people keep claiming is the biggest problem with the D3 system.